Tom Harrison brought in the money but left cricket smaller, poorer and divided

Not so long ago someone put a plastic turd in an envelope and posted it to Tom Harrison at the England and Wales Cricket Board. Think of it as a parting gift from the disaffected of English cricket, to go with Harrison’s share of the £2.1m in executive bonuses the ECB paid out this year. Harrison, who has a background in sales and marketing, is someone who imagines he would be able to win anyone over if they would only sit down and listen to him for 15 minutes one-on-one over a coffee. He seemed utterly nonplussed to discover there are people beyond the four walls of ECB headquarters who might feel differently about it.

The media release announcing Harrison’s farewell as the ECB chief executive ran to just under 1,000 wordsand you can’t but wonder how much of it was his own work. It was half as long again as the one they issued when Joe Root stepped down as England captain last month after a record number of Tests. If you were being kind you would say that’s a reflection of the outsize role Harrison has taken on in the game in these past seven years. Captains, chairmen and coaches have come and gone, Harrison has clung on and somehow become one of the defining figures of this era of English cricket. He has achieved a prominence entirely beyond that of his predecessor, David Collier.

The statement talks about “Tom’s leadership” during the pandemic. It mentions “Inspiring Generations”, “All Stars” and “Dynamos” and his desire to make the game “an extraordinary force for good”, his commitment to “tackling discrimination” and how he has overseen an era of “record investment in cricket” with “England Men and Women both crowned World Champions”. It would have been an embarrassingly fulsome statement to deliver to a bathroom